Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 to Revolutionary War hero Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III, who was jailed twice for debt and fled to the West Indies, leaving young Robert to care for his invalid mother and ill sister. Lee graduated second at West Point in 1829 without a single demerit, married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, and spent decades in the Corps of Engineers draining marshes and building Fort Pulaski and Fort Monroe before scouting routes through lava fields for Winfield Scott in Mexico.

After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee turned down a Union command when Virginia seceded. The episode sets his written view of slavery as an evil beside his management of hundreds of enslaved people at Arlington. Mocked as “Granny Lee” after Cheat Mountain, he took over the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, drove McClellan from Richmond, and won at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before Antietam and Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. After Appomattox he led Washington College, opposed Black voting rights, and became the central figure of the Lost Cause.

• Mary Custis’s father first objected to the match because of the Lee family’s disgraced name.
• Wesley Norris described whippings ordered by Lee after a failed escape from Arlington.
• Lee told the survivors of Pickett’s Charge, “All this has been my fault,” and offered his resignation.
• At Washington College he created a student honor system and recruited Northern students.
• Historians now point to his high casualty rates, and statues have been melted down and Army bases renamed.